They needed cash to travel. Alls had some left from Greg but Grace wanted to pull her own weight. Jacqueline had not paid her regular wages on Friday and she didn’t know what that meant. Alls had been hoping there would be some money in the safe but there had been only jewelry. Grace could have told him that Jacqueline didn’t have any money.
On Monday morning, she put on her best white sheath and a black cardigan over it for work. First she went to Lachaille with the trillions. She didn’t need to be at work right at nine. Jacqueline didn’t even know she had a key—Grace had copied Hanna’s without asking their boss—and this would be a poor time for Jacqueline to realize that she did. Jacqueline wouldn’t come in until ten, and Amaury and Hanna had keys to get in before then, but they were gone. Grace would get there just early enough to wait outside for her boss.
Lachaille’s steel grate was still down, despite that the sign said they opened at nine. Grace walked around the block. If Lachaille didn’t open soon, the day was already shot.
At 9:20 the grate flew up. Grace was watching from the café across the street.
“We don’t buy loose diamonds,” Mme Lachaille said, shaking her head. “And no certificates? No, we don’t do that.”
Grace spread out Alls’s torn page from Architectural Digest and pointed to her bracelet. “How much did you get for this? Five times what you paid me?”
The older woman pursed her dark lips. “It was a fair price.”
Grace folded her arms and waited. “I’ve sold you some really beautiful things,” she said. “I didn’t expect that I was—”
“These are not my business. I sell antique jewelry. These need antique jewelry behind them. You’re not going to get a good price anywhere.” She shook her head quickly. “Put some clothes on them,” she hissed.
Grace had expected a lowball offer that the magazine clip would improve; she had not expected to be turned down entirely.
“I can make a call for you,” Mme Lachaille said. “That’s it.”
“Please.”
Mme Lachaille rooted through her address book, grumbling, and then put up a finger. “I have to ask my husband,” she said. “One minute.”
Grace wouldn’t sell the trillions today—an early blow. She’d never sold jewelry anywhere else, and she didn’t have time to try, not if she was going to make it to work before Jacqueline, which she had to because she always did, and this day could not look any different. She needed to be there when Jacqueline discovered she had been robbed so that her accusations would fall on Hanna. And who would Lachaille send her to, anyway? She had no idea. No, it was too risky to improvise.
But Madame had left her address book splayed open on the glass counter, and under it, her blank pad of carbon paper receipts. An invitation. Grace knew her stoned-heiress-abroad act might not work everywhere. She had no certifications, no little slips of paper to legitimize her. Her charm had definite limits. She slipped the pad into her purse and then reached for the address book too. She might need to make some new friends soon.
She left quickly and quietly, stilling the bells that hung from the door in her hand.
On the sidewalk, she flipped open Alls’s phone. He had not called yet, but it was early. He was to go out this morning to buy another phone, and he had given her his to take. He said he would call her as soon as he had it so she could call him when Jacqueline discovered the safe had been emptied. “Just call the number back,” he said. “I won’t answer.” They needed to be ready to go, in case Jacqueline or her superiors went for Grace and her apartment instead of Hanna and hers.
Grace feared the call would not come and she would be left holding the bag. That was what she had done to him. But there was nothing to do except wait and see.
? ? ?
At work she pressed the buzzer as she always did, going through the motions but expecting silence. No one answered. Good. She leaned against the brick wall to wait. But then there was a crackle on the intercom, then a buzz, and the front lock clicked open. Damn.
The studio door was propped. Grace didn’t like this, any of it. She pushed open the door and saw Amaury standing there, baggy-eyed and grimacing, as if it were he who had been caught at something.
“My God,” she said. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”
He shook his head slowly, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. “And yet, here I am again. How are things?”
“Fine,” Grace said. “Slow. Very slow.” She dropped her bag on her chair and scratched her ankle. “Hanna’s almost finished with the centerpiece.”
“I saw,” he said. “It looks very nice.”
They stood together, admiring it. Grace had expected the project to take much longer, but Hanna had worked on nothing else. Grace blew into the air and watched the corn stalks flutter. She and Amaury laughed.
“I like the corn,” he said. “And the peaches, the little pits.”
“I did those,” Grace said, knowing he knew that. Carving fruit seemed like ages ago.
Grace squinted toward Hanna’s station.
“What is it?”
“She said she was going to finish the case on Saturday,” she told him. “She mixed some glue before she left on Friday.”
He frowned, but not as if he cared. Grace went to inspect Hanna’s unfinished work.
“And what have you been doing?” he asked. “More jewelry?”
“Just a few things, cleaning and resetting,” she said. “These rich people, knocking their jewelry around and breaking it. I guess if you have a lot of it, it’s less precious.” Too much, she thought. She should have said half that.
He nodded absently.
“It’s really strange that Hanna didn’t come in,” Grace said. “I hope she’s okay.”
Jacqueline came in at 10:20, looking as if she’d spent the weekend drinking on a boat. “Hanna’s not here,” Grace tattled. “And she didn’t finish the case.”
“Well, what are you waiting for? It’s due there at noon!”
The work was well below Hanna’s code, but Grace hustled together the last pieces of the case with a staple gun and twine. She carefully slid the centerpiece into its wide wooden box with Amaury’s help. It was heavy, maybe thirty pounds, and of what? Wool, wire, glass beads, and scraps of fabric.
She knocked on the door to Jacqueline’s office. “Pardon,” she said. “Are you going to pay us today?”
“Yeah,” her boss said absently. “This afternoon.”
“Because my rent is due and—”
“I said today.”
Grace called a taxi, and Amaury helped her get the centerpiece up the stairs. They declined the driver’s help.
“I should go with you,” Amaury said. “To get it out again.”
“Not necessary,” Grace said. “But I should take the gurney. Wait here?”
In the stairwell she opened the phone. Alls still had not called.
? ? ?
Grace let the driver help her slide the box onto the folding cart, and she rolled it into the lobby of the collector’s marble-floored building. She went up in the freight elevator, light-headed with nerves. She would unveil the centerpiece and show it off, and then she would return to work and the spectacle of horrors that would unfold there.
The collector, a man who otherwise looked disappointingly average in a starched white button-up, wore compass cufflinks, their arrows spinning indiscriminately. He breathed deeply, as if he were in the habit of meditating, but crossed and recrossed his arms as she pushed the gurney across the floor. He wanted the centerpiece in a small sitting room behind his library; he said he displayed his folk art there. The centerpiece was hardly folk art, but perhaps the man meant all his funny art, or all his miscellaneous art. She obliged, hearing him suck in his breath as she wheeled around corners. His walls were crowded with oils and tapestries, mostly religious scenes. She told him she would need assistance to move it off the gurney, and he doubled back to murmur into an intercom.
The room was furnished in bizarre simplicity with a single bed, a shabby dining table with one chair, and a child’s writing desk. The bedspread was threadbare. Grace thought of her attic bedroom at the Grahams’ and quickly shook off the memory.